In the World

by Richard Stratton

  “Well,” Stone says, “that’s a whole different matter. Yes, we were certainly interested in anything Stassi might have had to say about that . . . and about a good many other things, crimes that remain unsolved to this day, and about which Mr. Stassi no doubt has significant information. We were definitely interested in having him come in after he fled Cuba and agree to be debriefed with regard to a number of . . . events we were aware that Mr. Stassi had firsthand information about.”

  So, I say to Arnold Stone, this is your chance to ask Stassi about some of those events—the last chance anyone may ever have. I appeal to him based on his literary accomplishments: “This will be like bringing Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty together at the end of their careers.”

  He chuckles. “That’s pretty good,” he says. “Holmes and Moriarty . . .”

  I am to let him think it over and call me back.

  Arnold Stone is a man with an adventurous streak and an interest in history. When he calls back, Stone asks if Joe will answer his questions. “Well,” I say, “you know Joe. But he specifically asked for you. So let’s give it a try, and see what the old Mafioso is willing to divulge after all these years of silence.”

  NOT MUCH, AS it turns out. In fact, very little. It’s as though Joe simply wants to face the man whom he believes is responsible for his capture and long imprisonment, to be in the same room with him and gauge his substance, look into his eyes after so many years of dwelling upon him in his mind. Or maybe he just wants to prove that he endured all the government brought to bear and he survived. It’s like putting two ex-heavyweight fighters together long after they have both left the ring, to let them come to peaceful terms, and see how each other has weathered the tests of time and chance. So if Joe is still who he became as a young man, still an old-school gangster, and he won’t budge or give up his long-held secrets, he’s stayed in character, and it makes for good drama to put these two arch enemies together opposite each other in the waning years of both their lives, and let them look into each other’s eyes, gain the measure of the man in old age, and get the feel of the human being, the long-imagined foe gazing back at them.

  Arnold Stone is no less in character. Typical prosecutor, his first question after the two men meet and greet one another is, “Mr. Stassi, were you a made member of organized crime?” Joe, equally intransigent, answers equivocally. “Yes, and no,” he says. To which Stone rejoins, “Tell me about the yes, and tell me about the no.”

  In so many words, Joe answers that he was grandfathered in. They were kids running in the streets of New York, doing errands for what was known in those early years as the Black Hand. There was no formal swearing in or induction ceremony until later. He goes on to say that because of his childhood friendship with such men as Meyer Lansky and Ben “Bugsy” Siegel, and because he was Sicilian and had respect from the bosses of the Italian crime families, he developed a unique position as a kind of ambassador at large, someone who could go wherever he wanted, do whatever he wanted to do, work with different people from all the different ethnic criminal groups without answering to anyone in particular other than Meyer and Abe, who treated him as an equal.

  Yes, it’s true; Joe admits he had a falling out with Santo Trafficante in Cuba over the running of their club and casino the Sans Souci. And, yes, it’s also true Joe had a meeting, as reported by the FBI, with Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante in New York City exactly one year before the Kennedy assassination.

  “What did you talk about with Mr. Marcello and Mr. Trafficante?” Stone asks.

  “Nothing,” Joe deadpans. “We had breakfast.”

  “The Kennedys?”

  “We may have talked about them, and how Bobby, that little son of a bitch, what he done to Carlos. But—” Joe is emphatic: “Santo didn’t have the balls; Santo couldn’t do anything . . . unless he had someone else to do it for him.”

  “Some patsy?” I ask. “Someone like Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  Joe clams up. “I don’t know,” he says. “I never met Oswald.”

  “What about Jack Ruby?” I say.

  “What about him?”

  “Was he mobbed up?” Arnold Stone asks.

  “Well,” Joe says and shrugs, “you should know. You were the man in the Justice Department. Ruby . . . Yeah, Ruby was from Chicago. He had joints in Texas, nightclubs. So, you gotta figure, he knew people.”

  “People like Sam Giancana?” Stone keeps up the grilling.

  “Sam was a good man,” Joe asserts. “He never talked to nobody.”

  And that’s about as much as we are going to get out of Joe, at least at this point. He’s happy that we came through and brought him Arnold Stone. And for his part, Arnold Stone is equally impressed.

  “He’s like a sphinx,” Stone says on the drive to the airport. “You look into those eyes, it’s like looking into the eyes of some mythical creature who knows so much . . . has seen and done so much that he will never divulge. Did you ask him about the hit on Albert Anastasia?” Stone asks, referring to the famous barbershop murder of the so-called Lord High Executioner who had fallen out with the other bosses.

  “Yes,” I say. “And Joe did admit that he planned it.”

  “Well,” Arnold Stone comments, “we had plenty of evidence that Joe came up from Cuba and put the assassination team together, that he made sure Anastasia showed up for his morning shave, and then stuck around to see the killing carried out before he went back to Havana. Maybe not enough evidence to charge and convict Stassi beyond a reasonable doubt, but we certainly had no doubt. It was Stassi, just one of many major killings Stassi planned and executed for the mob. When it came to that kind of thing Joe was in a class all by himself. You should ask his son, Joe Junior . . . if you can locate him. He’s still wanted by the FBI.”

  THE FILMING CONTINUES with Joe’s second request, that we bring him back to New York City so he can eat some good food, and even revisit some of his old stomping grounds from his earliest days as a bootlegger and killer in Newark, New Jersey. Jayne Ku comes along to accompany him. It’s a trip down a grisly memory lane. Jayne flew to Florida, and then she and Joe fly to New York together. We put Joe up in a Manhattan hotel. Jayne has already moved into a midtown apartment paid for by Mr. Lee. Joe is confined to a wheelchair by this time. He’s incontinent and so made to wear a diaper. Jayne has become his traveling companion. If nothing else, this project will have managed to warm some long dormant and hardened cockles in the old man’s heart.

  We take Joe to the West Orange, New Jersey, mansion where a man Joe considered his closest friend, the man he most admired, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, who Joe calls Abe, allegedly hanged himself in the basement when summoned to testify before the McClellen Committee Hearings on Organized Crime in 1959. There were rumors at the time that Zwillman had been murdered on orders from Luciano to prevent him from testifying. If Joe knows the truth, he’s not willing to say. He’ll admit only to being deeply saddened by Zwillman’s death.

  We spend a day in and around Newark, visiting the location of the original chophouse where Dutch Shultz was ambushed, and Joe recounts how he lured Shultz to a bogus business meeting at the restaurant, where he was met by a barrage of bullets from a hit team of practiced Jewish killers Joe recruited from the old Murder, Inc. mob. And we take him to one of his homes, a mansion he lived in while he worked with Zwillman running the gambling rackets in New Jersey. Joe was known as Hoboken Joe. The current owner of the home comes out and is thrilled to meet the actual Hoboken Joe, about whom she has heard so much, and she brings her young children out to meet the old gangster.

  At a deli in the theater district, the owner is amazed to see that Joe is still alive. He recalls how Stassi was revered by all the top gangsters of the era. When we bring him to the hotel where Joe lived until he was forced to leave by Joe Kennedy Sr., who was having an affair with one of Joe’s lady friends, he freaks out, starts protesting that he’s been permanently banned from the premises. We have to remind him that was o
ver fifty years ago.

  MARC AND I travel to the Dominican Republic where we meet with Joe’s son, Joe Stassi Junior, in a bar and brothel. Joe Junior tells us of his childhood, growing up in Havana as the son of one of the most influential American underworld figures of the era. His father wanted his son to go to a good prep school in the States, go to college, and become a legitimate businessman. But early on Joe Junior had a hankering for the Cuban ladies and for his father’s glamorous gangster life. He soon quit school and went to work for his father in the casino at the Sans Souci. His dad, Joe Junior tells us, was highly regarded by all the bosses of the different families, not only those in New York but also the Tampa, New Orleans, and Chicago families, for his acumen and skill at resolving critical disputes. When there was an issue, some disagreement or problem that involved high-level members from different families, Joe was often consulted, asked to mediate and to deliver a ruling. He would listen patiently to both sides, hear any other evidence from outside sources, and then he would retire to his home and spend however long it took him in seclusion as he deliberated and reached his decision. He would then call the parties to meet and deliver his verdict. Men from all over the world of organized crime would come to Havana specifically to ask Joe for advice on how to settle disputes.

  Perhaps the most debated revelation Joe proclaimed, which still has so-called experts on organized crime disputing his version of events, involves the murder of Joe’s childhood friend, Ben “Bugsy” Siegel. As recounted in the GQ article, Joe claimed that it was not the mob who shot and killed Siegel, supposedly on orders from Lansky and Luciano, but it was actually the brother of Siegel’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill. Joe told me he was sent to Los Angeles by Luciano and Lansky soon after Siegel’s murder to determine who was responsible. Hill’s brother was an ex-Marine, a sharpshooter who Joe determined shot Siegel from across the street with a high-powered rifle. He was even able to locate the owner of the gas station where Virginia Hill’s brother kept the weapon he used to kill Siegel. When Joe reported his findings to Luciano and Lansky, the decision was made not to retaliate since Siegel’s killing had been over a personal matter and not business.

  “Listen to me,” Joe says, “if we are gonna kill a guy like Ben Siegel, we wouldn’t do it with a rifle from across the street. We would have some friend, someone Ben trusted, shoot him in the head and make sure he was dead, and then leave the gun.”

  The original story of Siegel’s killing, as recounted in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano by Martin A. Gosch, and then accepted as mob lore, that Siegel was killed on orders from Luciano and Lansky at a sit-down in Havana because of the runaway costs of building the Flamingo Casino in Las Vegas is, according to Joe, all nonsense. “Meyer loved Ben. Charlie Lucky, all the bosses who invested money in Vegas knew it was gonna be a gold mine. Ben was an honorable man. Nobody was worried about getting their money back. It was Virginia Hill’s brother who killed Ben because Ben beat her up. And that’s the truth, that’s the real story.”

  MARC AND I complete a short version of the documentary, a teaser, and screen it at the Tribeca Film Center to a full house, a good 20 percent of which is made up of former gangsters and actors who play gangsters. I also screen the teaser at the Hudson River Film Festival and sit for a Q and A after the screening. One fellow in the audience, who I suspect is an FBI agent, wants to know where and under what conditions we met with Joe Stassi Junior. I am left to ponder the impact of Stassi Senior’s life of crime on his family. From what I’m able to gather, Joe Stassi Junior is wanted by the government as much for what he supposedly knows about his father’s life as for what he personally may have done.

  Joe Senior’s wife, who as a young beauty queen was forced to forfeit her title when it was learned she had been married and divorced, lived without her husband most of the years of their marriage. Joe’s daughter, once she realized who her father was and what he had done, would have nothing more to do with him. Joe Junior, at the top of his class in prep school, refused to return to school after his Christmas vacation as a teenager in Havana, seduced by his father’s life and the sexy Cuban women.

  MR. LEE, AH, yes, let us not forget Mr. Lee. What was his hidden agenda? No great mystery there. How many men of means foray into the movie business in hopes of getting laid? A good many, we may presume. Harvey Weinstein is not alone. And how many film projects have foundered on the unrequited lusts of horny financiers? Mr. Lee may join the legions, as he underestimated the resolve of good Jayne Ku. She was not giving it up, at least not for married Mr. Lee. No, this was a business transaction, not an assignation, no agreement to become a kept woman. Jayne is a woman of real aspirations. When it became clear to Mr. Lee that he wasn’t getting any, he shut off the cash flow and disappeared. Jayne was forced to give up her Manhattan apartment and return to LA. Marc and I were left with hours of unedited film, archival footage that would need to be licensed to be used, and a main character, original gangster Joe Stassi, who was increasingly shuttered in his own dark memories and paranoid fears, tormented by his murderous rage and his guilt-ridden memories, still rummaging in his wallet looking for the numbers of long-dead hitmen to put a contract out on me for telling his story, for enabling him to violate his oath of omertà—the man who liberated him from prison so he could curse the world at large.

  Joe died in 2009 at age ninety-five, alone, sequestered in a nursing home. And what of his papers, that collection of documents and photographs and letters that would enable me to tell the real story, Joe’s story, what he saw and what he did, the true story of the founding years and personalities of organized crime in America? The papers supposedly moldered in a storage unit somewhere in Florida. They were soaked with rain from a leaky roof, Joe told me, and never recovered. Like Joe’s misspent life, the records of his time on earth, saturated and spoiled, turned to waste.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE INFORMER: WHITEY BULGER AND THE FBI

  We loathed informers. It wasn’t a conspiratorial thing— our folklore bled with the names of informers who had sold out their brethren to hangmen and worse in the lands of our ancestors.

  —William “Billy” Bulger, While the Music Lasts

  I AM INVITED to meet Sonny Grosso, a former New York City narcotics detective who is now a successful producer of film and TV. After a long and celebrated career as a detective—Sonny was one of the detectives who made the famous French Connection case—he has gone on to achieve an even more auspicious success as the producer of The French Connection, the classic, multiple-Academy-Award-winning crime film directed by William Friedkin and starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. Sonny was one of the creators of the long-running reality show Cops, and he and his LA-based partner have made a number of TV films, series, and documentaries.

  When Sonny and I meet in the spring of 2002, he’s intrigued to learn that I met and had dealings with infamous Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger. Sonny, who says he is a fan of Street Time, wants me to meet former special agent John Connolly, Whitey Bulger’s beleaguered FBI handler. Connolly is out on bail awaiting trial in federal court in Boston on numerous charges related to his long, complex, and now allegedly criminal relationship with Bulger and Bulger’s right-hand man, Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi. Both were what are known as Top Echelon (TE) Criminal Informers, who worked closely with the FBI while also running a lucrative and murderous criminal enterprise. Top Echelon informers are allowed to continue to commit crimes and promised they will never be revealed as informants, never be arrested for their crimes, and never have to face trial and imprisonment so long as they continue to provide valuable information to their FBI agent handlers.

  John Connolly’s relationship with Bulger was the subject of a book, Black Mass, by two Boston newspaper reporters, Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neil, which is to be the basis of a movie. Like nearly all of the reporting done on the case, Black Mass portrays Connolly as a corrupt federal agent acting on his own to become a co-conspirator with Bulger and Flemmi i
n their long reign as major players associated with a multiethnic criminal group known as the Winter Hill Gang. It’s a superficial understanding of the TE/FBI relationship at best.

  Sonny Grosso, John Connolly, and I meet for dinner at a restaurant a few blocks from Sonny’s offices on Third Avenue. Both Sonny and Connolly are relieved to learn that I’m already familiar with the long-held secrets of what is known as the FBI’s Top Echelon Informant Program. I had received a tip and written a magazine article entitled “The Grim Reaper’s Girlfriend,” published in the August 1996 issue of Penthouse, about another murderous wiseguy, Colombo Family capo Greg Scarpa, who had personally killed a number of enemy combatants during the bloody Colombo Family internecine wars, while a member of the elite FBI/TE club.

  So, I get it; I know how the FBI/TE relationship works, and I’m not shocked or scandalized to hear that the FBI had long-standing deals with high-level mobsters of the likes of Jimmy Bulger, Stevie Flemmi, and Greg Scarpa. The program works. Major government prosecutions, including the case that made Rudy Giuliani’s career as a prosecutor, the Commission Case in New York—in which the bosses of all five Mafia families were convicted and sentenced to hundreds of years in prison—were based largely on information the FBI got from Scarpa and other TE informers. And in Boston, the New England Patriarca Crime Family was decimated through information the bureau got from Flemmi and Bulger, provided by Special Agent John Connolly.

  Law enforcement depends on information gathered from informers. In order to arrest and convict the bosses of sophisticated, secret criminal groups, agents need access to intelligence from the highest levels of organized crime. That kind of information can only come from members or trusted associates who are accepted, respected, and often feared in criminal circles, men who are killers themselves and therefore never suspected of working for the FBI and yet are willing to work in the informer’s dangerous netherworld.